OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
D-GAN: Deep Generative Adversarial Nets for Spatio-Temporal Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Spatio-temporal (ST) data for urban applications, such as taxi demand, traffic flow, regional rainfall is inherently stochastic and unpredictable. Recently, deep learning based ST prediction models are proposed to learn the ST characteristics of data. However, it is still very challenging (1) to adequately learn the complex and non-linear ST relationships; (2) to model the high variations in the ST data volumes as it is inherently dynamic, changing over time (i.e., irregular) and highly influenced by many external factors, such as adverse weather, accidents, traffic control, PoI, etc.; and (3) as there can be many complicated external factors that can affect the accuracy and it is impossible to list them explicitly. To handle the aforementioned issues, in this paper, we propose a novel deep generative adversarial network based model (named, D-GAN) for more accurate ST prediction by implicitly learning ST feature representations in an unsupervised manner. D-GAN adopts a GAN-based structure and jointly learns generation and variational inference of data. More specifically, D-GAN consists of two major parts: (1) a deep ST feature learning network to model the ST correlations and semantic variations, and underlying factors of variations and irregularity in the data through the implicit distribution modelling; (2) a fusion module to incorporate external factors for reaching a better inference. To the best our knowledge, no prior work studies ST prediction problem via deep implicit generative model and in an unsupervised manner. Extensive experiments performed on two real-world datasets show that D-GAN achieves more accurate results than traditional as well as deep learning based ST prediction methods.
A Survey on Federated Learning Systems: Vision, Hype and Reality for Data Privacy and Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Federated learning has been a hot research topic in enabling the collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations under the privacy restrictions. As researchers try to support more machine learning models with different privacy-preserving approaches, there is a requirement in developing systems and infrastructures to ease the development of various federated learning algorithms. Similar to deep learning systems such as PyTorch and TensorFlow that boost the development of deep learning, federated learning systems (FLSs) are equivalently important, and face challenges from various aspects such as effectiveness, efficiency, and privacy. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review on federated learning systems. To achieve smooth flow and guide future research, we introduce the definition of federated learning systems and analyze the system components. Moreover, we provide a thorough categorization for federated learning systems according to six different aspects, including data distribution, machine learning model, privacy mechanism, communication architecture, scale of federation and motivation of federation. The categorization can help the design of federated learning systems as shown in our case studies. By systematically summarizing the existing federated learning systems, we present the design factors, case studies, and future research opportunities.
HUGE2: a Highly Untangled Generative-model Engine for Edge-computing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

As a type of prominent studies in deep learning, generative models have been widely investigated in research recently. Two research branches of the deep learning models, the Generative Networks (GANs, VAE) and the Semantic Segmentation, rely highly on the upsampling operations, especially the transposed convolution and the dilated convolution. However, these two types of convolutions are intrinsically different from standard convolution regarding the insertion of zeros in input feature maps or in kernels respectively. This distinct nature severely degrades the performance of the existing deep learning engine or frameworks, such as Darknet, Tensorflow, and PyTorch, which are mainly developed for the standard convolution. Another trend in deep learning realm is to deploy the model onto edge/ embedded devices, in which the memory resource is scarce. In this work, we propose a Highly Untangled Generative-model Engine for Edge-computing or HUGE2 for accelerating these two special convolutions on the edge-computing platform by decomposing the kernels and untangling these smaller convolutions by performing basic matrix multiplications. The methods we propose use much smaller memory footprint, hence much fewer memory accesses, and the data access patterns also dramatically increase the reusability of the data already fetched in caches, hence increasing the localities of caches. Our engine achieves a speedup of nearly 5x on embedded CPUs, and around 10x on embedded GPUs, and more than 50% reduction of memory access.
Supervised and Unsupervised Neural Approaches to Text Readability
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We present a set of novel neural supervised and unsupervised approaches for determining the readability of documents. In the unsupervised setting, we leverage neural language models, whereas in the supervised setting, three different neural classification architectures are tested. We show that the proposed neural unsupervised approach is robust, transferable across languages and allows adaptation to a specific readability task and data set. By systematic comparison of several neural architectures on a number of benchmark and new labelled readability datasets in two languages, this study also offers a comprehensive analysis of different neural approaches to readability classification. We expose their strengths and weaknesses, compare their performance to current state-of-the-art classification approaches to readability, which in most cases still rely on extensive feature engineering, and propose possibilities for improvements.
Distributed Resource Allocation over Time-varying Balanced Digraphs with Discrete-time Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

This work is concerned with the problem of distributed resource allocation in continuous-time setting but with discrete-time communication over infinitely jointly connected and balanced digraphs. We provide a passivity-based perspective for the continuous-time algorithm, based on which an intermittent communication scheme is developed. Particularly, a periodic communication scheme is first derived through analyzing the passivity degradation over output sampling of the distributed dynamics at each node. Then, an asynchronous distributed event-triggered scheme is further developed. The sampled-based event-triggered communication scheme is exempt from Zeno behavior as the minimum inter-event time is lower bounded by the sampling period. The parameters in the proposed algorithm rely only on local information of each individual nodes, which can be designed in a truly distributed fashion
Observability and Chaos Engineering on System Calls for Containerized Applications in Docker
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we present a novel fault injection system called ChaosOrca for system calls in containerized applications. ChaosOrca aims at evaluating a given application's self-protection capability with respect to system call errors. The unique feature of ChaosOrca is that it conducts experiments under production-like workload without instrumenting the application. We exhaustively analyze all kinds of system calls and utilize different levels of monitoring techniques to reason about the behaviour under perturbation. We evaluate ChaosOrca on three real-world applications: a file transfer client, a reverse proxy server and a micro-service oriented web application. Our results show that it is promising to detect weaknesses of resilience mechanisms related to system calls issues.
Partially Ordered Automata and Piecewise Testability
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

Partially ordered automata are automata where the transition relation induces a partial order on states. The expressive power of partially ordered automata is closely related to the expressivity of fragments of first-order logic on finite words or, equivalently, to the language classes of the levels of the Straubing-Thérien hierarchy. Several fragments (levels) have been intensively investigated under various names. For instance, the fragment of first-order formulae with a single existential block of quantifiers in prenex normal form is known as piecewise testable languages or $J$-trivial languages. These languages are characterized by confluent partially ordered DFAs or by complete, confluent, and self-loop-deterministic partially ordered NFAs (ptNFAs for short). In this paper, we study the complexity of basic questions for several types of partially ordered automata on finite words; namely, the questions of inclusion, equivalence, and ($k$-)piecewise testability. The lower-bound complexity boils down to the complexity of universality. The universality problem asks whether a system recognizes all words over its alphabet. For ptNFAs, the complexity of universality decreases if the alphabet is fixed, but it is open if the alphabet may grow with the number of states. We show that deciding universality for general ptNFAs is as hard as for general NFAs. Our proof is a novel and nontrivial extension of our recent construction for self-loop-deterministic partially ordered NFAs, a model strictly more expressive than ptNFAs. We provide a comprehensive picture of the complexities of the problems of inclusion, equivalence, and ($k$-)piecewise testability for the considered types of automata.
On the Merge of k-NN Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

k-nearest neighbor graph is a fundamental data structure in many disciplines such as information retrieval, data-mining, pattern recognition, and machine learning, etc. In the literature, considerable research has been focusing on how to efficiently build an approximate k-nearest neighbor graph (k-NN graph) for a fixed dataset. Unfortunately, a closely related issue of how to merge two existing k-NN graphs has been overlooked. In this paper, we address the issue of k-NN graph merging in two different scenarios. In the first scenario, a symmetric merge algorithm is proposed to combine two approximate k-NN graphs. The algorithm facilitates large-scale processing by the efficient merging of k-NN graphs that are produced in parallel. In the second scenario, a joint merge algorithm is proposed to expand an existing k-NN graph with a raw dataset. The algorithm enables the incremental construction of a hierarchical approximate k-NN graph. Superior performance is attained when leveraging the hierarchy for NN search of various data types, dimensionality, and distance measures.
Health-Informed Policy Gradients for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This paper proposes a definition of system health in the context of multiple agents optimizing a joint reward function. We use this definition as a credit assignment term in a policy gradient algorithm to distinguish the contributions of individual agents to the global reward. The health-informed credit assignment is then extended to a multi-agent variant of the proximal policy optimization algorithm and demonstrated on particle and multiwalker robot environments that have characteristics such as system health, risk-taking, semi-expendable agents, continuous action spaces, and partial observability. We show significant improvement in learning performance compared to policy gradient methods that do not perform multi-agent credit assignment.
Imbalance-XGBoost: Leveraging Weighted and Focal Losses for Binary Label-Imbalanced Classification with XGBoost
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The paper presents Imbalance-XGBoost, a Python package that combines the powerful XGBoost software with weighted and focal losses to tackle binary label-imbalanced classification tasks. Though a small-scale program in terms of size, the package is, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first of its kind which provides an integrated implementation for the two losses on XGBoost and brings a general-purpose extension on XGBoost for label-imbalanced scenarios. In this paper, the design and usage of the package are described with exemplar code listings, and its convenience to be integrated into Python-driven Machine Learning projects is illustrated. Furthermore, as the first- and second-order derivatives of the loss functions are essential for the implementations, the algebraic derivation is discussed and it can be deemed as a separate algorithmic contribution. The performances of the algorithms implemented in the package are empirically evaluated on Parkinson's disease classification data set, and multiple state-of-the-art performances have been observed. Given the scalable nature of XGBoost, the package has great potentials to be applied to real-life binary classification tasks, which are usually of large-scale and label-imbalanced.
Benchmarking Bonus-Based Exploration Methods on the Arcade Learning Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of recently developed exploration algorithms within the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). We study the use of different reward bonuses that incentives exploration in reinforcement learning. We do so by fixing the learning algorithm used and focusing only on the impact of the different exploration bonuses in the agent's performance. We use Rainbow, the state-of-the-art algorithm for value-based agents, and focus on some of the bonuses proposed in the last few years. We consider the impact these algorithms have on performance within the popular game Montezuma's Revenge which has gathered a lot of interest from the exploration community, across the the set of seven games identified by Bellemare et al. (2016) as challenging for exploration, and easier games where exploration is not an issue. We find that, in our setting, recently developed bonuses do not provide significantly improved performance on Montezuma's Revenge or hard exploration games. We also find that existing bonus-based methods may negatively impact performance on games in which exploration is not an issue and may even perform worse than $ε$-greedy exploration.
Multiplex graph matching matched filters
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the problem of detecting a noisy induced multiplex template network in a larger multiplex background network. Our approach, which extends the framework of Sussman et al. (2019) to the multiplex setting, leverages a multiplex analogue of the classical graph matching problem to use the template as a matched filter for efficiently searching the background for candidate template matches. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated both theoretically and empirically, with particular attention paid to the potential benefits of considering multiple channels.
The Power of the Weisfeiler-Leman Algorithm to Decompose Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2021
Year: 2021

The Weisfeiler-Leman procedure is a widely-used technique for graph isomorphism testing that works by iteratively computing an isomorphism-invariant coloring of vertex tuples. Meanwhile, a fundamental tool in structural graph theory, which is often exploited in approaches to tackle the graph isomorphism problem, is the decomposition into 2- and 3-connected components. We prove that the 2-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm implicitly computes the decomposition of a graph into its 3-connected components. This implies that the dimension of the algorithm needed to distinguish two given non-isomorphic graphs is at most the dimension required to distinguish non-isomorphic 3-connected components of the graphs (assuming dimension at least 2). To obtain our decomposition result, we show that, for k >= 2, the k-dimensional algorithm distinguishes k-separators, i.e., k-tuples of vertices that separate the graph, from other vertex k-tuples. As a byproduct, we also obtain insights about the connectivity of constituent graphs of association schemes. In an application of the results, we show the new upper bound of k on the Weisfeiler-Leman dimension of the class of graphs of treewidth at most k. Using a construction by Cai, Fürer, and Immerman, we also provide a new lower bound that is asymptotically tight up to a factor of 2.
Entropic Out-of-Distribution Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection approaches usually present special requirements (e.g., hyperparameter validation, collection of outlier data) and produce side effects (e.g., classification accuracy drop, slower energy-inefficient inferences). We argue that these issues are a consequence of the SoftMax loss anisotropy and disagreement with the maximum entropy principle. Thus, we propose the IsoMax loss and the entropic score. The seamless drop-in replacement of the SoftMax loss by IsoMax loss requires neither additional data collection nor hyperparameter validation. The trained models do not exhibit classification accuracy drop and produce fast energy-efficient inferences. Moreover, our experiments show that training neural networks with IsoMax loss significantly improves their OOD detection performance. The IsoMax loss exhibits state-of-the-art performance under the mentioned conditions (fast energy-efficient inference, no classification accuracy drop, no collection of outlier data, and no hyperparameter validation), which we call the seamless OOD detection task. In future work, current OOD detection methods may replace the SoftMax loss with the IsoMax loss to improve their performance on the commonly studied non-seamless OOD detection problem.
Cluster-based Distributed Augmented Lagrangian Algorithm for a Class of Constrained Convex Optimization Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a distributed solution for a constrained convex optimization problem over a network of clustered agents each consisted of a set of subagents. The communication range of the clustered agents is such that they can form a connected undirected graph topology. The total cost in this optimization problem is the sum of the local convex costs of the subagents of each cluster. We seek a minimizer of this cost subject to a set of affine equality constraints, and a set of affine inequality constraints specifying the bounds on the decision variables if such bounds exist. We design our distributed algorithm in a cluster-based framework which results in a significant reduction in communication and computation costs. Our proposed distributed solution is a novel continuous-time algorithm that is linked to the augmented Lagrangian approach. It converges asymptotically when the local cost functions are convex and exponentially when they are strongly convex and have Lipschitz gradients. Moreover, we use an $ε$-exact penalty function to address the inequality constraints and derive an explicit lower bound on the penalty function weight to guarantee convergence to $ε$-neighborhood of the global minimum value of the cost. A numerical example demonstrates our results.
On the Capacity of Secure Distributed Batch Matrix Multiplication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The problem of secure distributed batch matrix multiplication (SDBMM) studies the communication efficiency of retrieving a sequence of desired matrix products ${\bf AB}$ $=$ $({\bf A}_1{\bf B}_1,$ ${\bf A}_2{\bf B}_2,$ $\cdots,$ ${\bf A}_S{\bf B}_S)$ from $N$ distributed servers where the constituent matrices ${\bf A}=({\bf A}_1, {\bf A}_2, \cdots, {\bf A}_S)$ and ${\bf B}=({\bf B}_1, {\bf B}_2,\cdots,{\bf B}_S)$ are stored in $X$-secure coded form, i.e., any group of up to $X$ colluding servers learn nothing about ${\bf A, B}$. It is assumed that ${\bf A}_s\in\mathbb{F}_q^{L\times K}, {\bf B}_s\in\mathbb{F}_q^{K\times M}, s\in\{1,2,\cdots, S\}$ are uniformly and independently distributed and $\mathbb{F}_q$ is a large finite field. The rate of an SDBMM scheme is defined as the ratio of the number of bits of desired information that is retrieved, to the total number of bits downloaded on average. The supremum of achievable rates is called the capacity of SDBMM. In this work we explore the capacity of SDBMM, as well as several of its variants, e.g., where the user may already have either ${\bf A}$ or ${\bf B}$ available as side-information, and/or where the security constraint for either ${\bf A}$ or ${\bf B}$ may be relaxed. We obtain converse bounds, as well as achievable schemes for various cases of SDBMM, depending on the $L, K, M, N, X$ parameters, and identify parameter regimes where these bounds match. A remarkable aspect of our upper bounds is a connection between SDBMM and a form of private information retrieval (PIR) problem, known as multi-message $X$-secure $T$-private information retrieval (MM-XSTPIR). Notable features of our achievable schemes include the use of cross-subspace alignment and a transformation argument that converts a scalar multiplication problem into a scalar addition problem, allowing a surprisingly efficient solution.
GeoBlocks: A Query-Cache Accelerated Data Structure for Spatial Aggregation over Polygons
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

As individual traffic and public transport in cities are changing, city authorities need to analyze urban geospatial data to improve transportation and infrastructure. To that end, they highly rely on spatial aggregation queries that extract summarized information from point data (e.g., Uber rides) contained in a given polygonal region (e.g., a city neighborhood). To support such queries, current analysis tools either allow only predefined aggregates on predefined regions and are thus unsuitable for exploratory analyses, or access the raw data to compute aggregate results on-the-fly, which severely limits the interactivity. At the same time, existing pre-aggregation techniques are inadequate since they maintain aggregates over rectangular regions. As a result, when applied over arbitrary polygonal regions, they induce an approximation error that cannot be bounded. In this paper, we introduce GeoBlocks, a novel pre-aggregating data structure that supports spatial aggregation over arbitrary polygons. GeoBlocks closely approximate polygons using a set of fine-grained grid cells and, in contrast to prior work, allow to bound the approximation error by adjusting the cell size. Furthermore, GeoBlocks employ a trie-like cache that caches aggregate results of frequently queried regions, thereby dynamically adapting to the skew inherently present in query workloads and improving performance over time. In summary, GeoBlocks outperform on-the-fly aggregation by up to three orders of magnitude, achieving the sub-second query latencies required for interactive exploratory analytics.